dublin: everything else

here's the rest of everything i scribbled in dublin. i feel like a butthead for being to lazy to type this out for so long.

last night we ate at eddie rockets (like johnny rockets, only eddie's). surely a very expensive market research study is behind this. [turns out they're not connected. who knew?] Similarly so for tk maxx. [who are connected to tj maxx.] i ordered the atomic burger in desperate search for some spice (they don't seem to like spice very much here) and even though it had jalapeños and chili on it, it was still...middlingly spicy. but delicious.

we've done a ton of tour bus rides. some of the drivers tell the same jokes as each other ("if you look closely at the ground level of the department of defense, you can see de-fence!") but they're all quite funny and it's a surprisingly effective way to see some things you don't have time to see up close. i'd recommend it to anyone.

you can walk pretty much everywhere here in about 10 minutes. the crosswalk system is mind-boggling, so everyone jaywalks. which is dangerous if you're always looking the wrong way for oncoming traffic. on more than one occasion we could have known first hand what it would be like for a double-decker bus to crash into us (to die by your side...). the walk signals here make laser gun noises to alert you that it's ok to cross the street.

i've taken a lot of photographs of buildings. and statues. i've already forgotten the stories behind most...but they sure are nice to look at. it's a beautiful city. you can see basically all of it from the guinness storehouse's "gravity bar," which is only 7 stories up.



guinness is like budweiser here, which is funny. they have branding in the windows of almost every pub. it has the same effect on the locals, it seems, as budweiser's stateside omnipresence has: people who order guinness seem to me to be people who only drink guinness. everyone else drinks cooler beers, like bud and heineken. crazy world.

we toured the dublin castle today, which remains a functional government building. strange to think that ireland has only been a completely sovereign nation for 85 years. they've had a woman president since 1995 and will until at leat 2014. cool.


saw a fish & chips place that apparently springsteen himself has visited (lots of other famous folks, too) but we'd already eaten chips at a different place across the liffey, about a 10 minute's walk away. [too bad really, apparently burdock's has the best fish & chips in all of ireland, if those reviews are to be believed.]
it was supposed to rain the whole time we were here. we fly out tomorrow morning, and no rain yet. [it did rain the morning we left.] it's been about 40º - 50º F, too. which is outright balmy compared to nyc lately. i'd really like to stay here a while longer.